Earlier this week, I outlined the biggest overriding reason why Practices fall off the wagon and have “bad months”. If you missed it, ignored it, think you are too good for it … find it, read it, study it and really apply it to your practice.
I can always predict a pending down month within the next 2-3 or even 4-6 months of a practice cycle by looking at a few specific and key indicators (that I call “Healthy Growth Indicators”), to know if things are going in the right direction.
Most Doctors judge success by feel and mood than they do by numbers and real, tangible, structured business principles.
If you are not selling enough every day to hit your monthly target for even just a few days at a time, one day if you take it really seriously, then you have to acknowledge it and do something about it.
It is very strange to me that professionals could let a bad month happen for days and weeks on end without some dramatic intervention or wake up call to both themselves and their team.
I have often thought the idea of talking about what happened yesterday so ridiculous. No sports team wakes up today and reads the newspaper to find out the score of yesterday’s game and whether they won or lost. No, fans do that, not professionals.
Professionals are on to the next game … learning from the good or bad from yesterday but focused on today, tomorrow, and weeks (hopefully months) ahead.
Show me a Doctor who has their finger on the pulse of their practice and I will show you someone who is managing their growth ahead of the schedule; not so short sighted to focus on the production of the day but of the direction of the practice overall.
The worst part of why bad months happens is because we don’t set the expectation that we are not going to allow them to happen anymore.
So, let’s do this, this week… Let’s talk about reality.
1st – If you haven’t had the biggest month of your entire career in 2016 (preferably in the last 3-6 months) then we have a problem.
2nd – If you take the lowest month of the year and it is less that a 30% dip, then there is a problem.
3rd – If your biggest and lowest month for the year were right next to each other then you are destined to repeat it again.
The key to all success is consistency. Consistency for your daily performance, consistency for your month over month growth, consistency for your percentage of increase quarter over quarter and consistency in the continual increase in your new patient values year over year.
Simply put: you have to be aware of these things, not at the mercy of them but in control over them.
You do that by tracking your diagnosis every day; tracking the amount of treatment that gets accepted and scheduled every day; and obviously tracking the amount of money collected on both the treatment done and the treatment scheduled.
When you delink production from collections and you put your focus on not just talking about treatment with patients but actually getting them to commit to doing the treatment and investing in their health – it changes everything.
As you already know, you will get what you focus on.
Focus on one tooth dentistry, focus on emergency problems, focus on composites, focus on discounting, focus on getting through the day … whatever you focus on is what you are going to get.
Focus on keeping score, building for the future, tracking, creating, taking initiative with healthy growth … you will see the results and you will stay ahead of any bad months.
If you are not checking up with your team or at least your leaders every day, you are going to quickly get behind even if you don’t realize it. It will sneak up on you.
Here is the best thing I can tell you today…
You want dentistry to be something that happens WITH your patients, not TO your patients. You want your team not to be only in the business of doing dentistry but of cultivating the dentistry to do.
Next week, we move on to another topic. I will say this one last time: bad months do not happen, they don’t exist, only a string of bad days where you lost your focus and weeks where you failed to course correct to stop the slide and get back on top.
Good news … in dentistry, you are one great case, one A-Patient, one solid day from turning around your entire month. Believe it, act like it, and hey it just might happen. Make that your reality even when you don’t need it to save your bad months – that’s how you better your bests and hit record breaking months one after the other.
If you are ready to take control of your dental business like never before and serious about wanting to achieve real life-changing growth through value-based, profitable dentistry then begin by immersing yourself in my custom profit blueprint process that I have use to routinely create millionaire income dentists without increases in size, overhead or volume – just profit and dentistry that leads to amazing transformations for you, your team, and your patients.
In honor of the last day of the 3rd quarter, if you are ready to finish the year strong and start 2017 better than ever before, there is only one way to guarantee that it will happen and there is only one person that back up that guarantee with reality: me.
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